In Pursuit of Spenser by Otto Penzler Read Free Book Online Page A

undress when I did that, but I guess the smile had lost a step,” or, “Hard to warm up to someone who didn’t like beer” ( Early Autumn ), he nailed a voice as distinctive as that of Elmore Leonard’s Detroit or Richard Price’s New Jersey. It was the voice of a city and maybe even a bit more than that; it was the voice of a time. And with his passing, that time has gone with him.

THEY LIKE THE WAY IT SOUNDS
    | LAWRENCE BLOCK |
    INTERVIEWER : Why do you think your work is so popular?
    ROBERT B. PARKER : I dunno. I think people just like the way it sounds.
    THAT’S A WONDERFULLY quotable exchange, and I wish I could be sure I was quoting it correctly. I wasn’t there when these words were spoken. It was passed on to me second- or third-hand, but what I heard rang a bell, and I can still hear the echo.
    Because I believe he got it right. Why is everything Bob Parker wrote so popular? I think we just like the way it sounds.
    • •
    Ruth Cavin was a great mystery editor who left us too soon, although not before she’d lived ninety-two years. She stressed the great importance of the writer’s voice. It was, Ruth said, as unique as a thumbprint, and the chief factor in the success or failure of a piece of writing. And it was inherent in thewriter. You couldn’t learn it. You couldn’t do a hell of a lot to develop it or refine it. What you had to do was find it, which was task enough.
    And what you found might or might not be worth the effort.
    • •
    We think of voice more in connection with the performing arts. An actor has a voice, and it amounts to something rather more than pitch and register and tone; it’s what makes us listen intently or puts us to sleep.
    “I could listen to him read the phone book,” we say with admiration.
    A musician has a voice. The touch of a particular set of fingers on the keys of a piano, the notes that come out of the bell of a horn—they are individual, and sometimes unmistakably so. You might, if you practice enough, and if you’re talented to begin with, play the same sounds Louis Armstrong played. But they won’t sound the same.
    A singer has a voice. One can almost say that a singer is a voice, that anything learned—phrasing, breath control—merely allow the true voice to be heard.
    A story, if I may. An aspiring singer went to audition for a great vocal coach. While the last notes died out, the coach sat for a few moments in silence. Then he strode to the window and threw it open, motioning to the singer to join him.
    “Listen,” he said. “Do you hear the crow?”
    “Yes.”
    “ Caw, caw, caw . You hear him?”
    “I do.”
    “The crow,” the old man said, “thinks his song is beautiful.”
    • •
    But writing is silent, isn’t it? It’s an act performed in silence, and its creations are appreciated in a similar silence. (The medium of the audiobook is an exception, in that one reads it not with one’s eyes but with one’s ears, and there are accordingly two voices involved, those of the writer and the narrator.)
    “As idle as a painted ship/Upon a painted ocean,” wrote Coleridge, in his own unmistakable voice. We do, in fact, hear the voice of the writer, all the silence notwithstanding. It falls upon the inner ear. We hear it.
    • •
    Voice. Isn’t it just another word for style?
    No.
    Different people will define style differently. But I’m writing this, so I get to use my definition. Which goes like this:
    Style is that façade a writer erects to conceal his voice.
    • •
    If Bob Parker wrote a phone book, people would read it.
    Well, perhaps I exaggerate. But his voice did have magical properties. On two separate occasions I picked a book of his off a library shelf, just intending to read a few pages and get an idea of what he was up to in this latest effort.
    Fat chance. A few pages? A couple of paragraphs and he had me, and both times I read the book all the way through to the end.
    (This would have been less likely had the books had